This collection of essays in American Studies investigates how American cultural production intersects with public memory. The contributions present the results of diverse fields of research. While most are literary analyses, others focus on film, art works, monuments, and other means by which public memory is shaped. The essays in this collection also analyze travel writings, records of political history, and the ways American agricultural landscape preserves traces of the country’s past.

Tomasz Basiuk is a literary and cultural studies scholar, whose work is focused in postmodernism and queer studies. Sylwia Ku?ma-Markowska works on social American history with a strong interest in gender-inflected aspects of American society. Krystyna Mazur has written on American poetry and film. She is working on a project about lesbian poets in Modernism. All three teach at the American Studies Center of the University of Warsaw.

Contents: Tomasz Basiuk/Sylwia Ku?ma-Markowska/Krystyna Mazur: Introduction – Erika Doss: Who Owns Historical Memory? Commemorative Conflicts in the American Southwest – Edyta Frelik: «Ideas freed from events which brought them into being»: Jasper Johns’s Use of History – William R. Glass: «Do We Get to Win this Time?» Hollywood’s History of the Vietnam War – Rados?aw Rybkowski: Meaningless History: The Use of History in the American Musical – Marta Marciniak: «Do you remember rock and roll radio?» - Punk as Nostalgia for Punk – Jason Ruiz: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Economic Conquest – Keith Griffler: Come Together: The Underground Railroad and the Project for the New American Century – Aleksandra Szaniawska: «Freedom Is Contagious»: Conflicted Relations between Black and White Women in the Civil Rights and Early Women’s Liberation Movement – Yuri Stulov: Black History in Contemporary African American Fiction – Dominika Ferens: Diachronic vs. Synchronic Accounts of Cultural Difference in Paule Marshall’s – Aneta Dybska: History and Heterotopia in Gloria Naylor’s Novel (1985) – Emilia Borowska: Gayl Jones’s : A Post-Cartesian Response to the Past Which Is Not Her Own – Ma?gorzata Zió?ek-Sowi?ska: History in the Music and Poetry of African American Spirituals – Jerzy Kamionowski: Out of the Past Endlessly Rocking: Audre Lorde’s Use of Dahomean Myths – Paulina Ambro?y-Lis: «It Is this Brokenness that Interests Me»: The Aesthetics and Politics of Fragment in Susan Howe’s Historical Poetry – Pawe? Stachura: The End of History in Whitman’s War Poems – Alicja Piechucka: «History Is Now»: Historical Experience and Historical Vacuum in T. S. Eliot and the French Symbolists – Mateusz Liwi?ski: Retrofuturistic Impulse: Skeuomorphs of the Atomic Era in – Justyna Kociatkiewicz: History as Loss, History as Waste: American Twentieth Century in the Novels of Bellow and DeLillo – Maciej Mas?owski: «Like nothing in this life»: The Concept of Historic Time in Don DeLillo’s – Gustavo Sánchez Canales: «In a Different World, We Could Have Been Real Friends:» Two Opposite Approaches to the Issue of the Holocaust in Jonathan Safran Foer’s – Agnieszka Graff: «But this was not Nazi Germany. This was America.» Revisiting the Concentration Camp Analogy in Betty Friedan’s – W?odzimierz Batóg: The American 1960s: Historians’ Debate – James G. Ryan: Historians of American Communism Remain in Denial – Pawe? Laidler: The Best Mean to an End: The «Three-Element List» as a Method of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Adjudication. A Historical Perspective – Damian S. Pyrkosz: The Past Revitalized: Preservation of the Rural America’s Cultural Heritage – Karol Derwich: American Exceptionalism in U.S. Latin American Policy at the Turn of 19th and 20th Century – David Jones/Joanna Waluk: The Magic Became Tragic: The Special Diplomatic Exchange Between the Republic of Poland and the United States of America, 1934 to 1939. Inhaltsverzeichnis